July - December 2003

December 30: The Triumph of the Book

A December 28 article in the Denver Post comments on the way public libraries are having to shed their image as "temples of the printed page" and become more like multimedia centres. "The relentless boom in information captured on DVD, videotape, CD and cassette tape - not to mention rivers of data flowing into homes on high-speed Internet - has rapidly transformed the way people use libraries." In Denver over half of all circulation is now generated by the audio-visual collection. As this type of use rises, libraries are having to dedicate ever larger portions of their operating budgets to buying CDs and DVDs. In effect, the libraries are operating like local Blockbuster stores, only cheaper.

The Denver experience is not unique. In a story that appeared a week earlier in the Seattle Times it was reported that the BBC's Big Read project, a quest to find the nation's favorite novel and encourage reading, "had a somewhat counterproductive effect":

"The BBC-sponsored event definitely spurred book sales in Great Britain. But in this visual age, it also generated a huge spike in purchases of DVD film and television versions of the favorites.

"Take Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (No. 2 behind the winner: J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). The 19th-century tale of courtship and conceit saw a 73 percent jump in book sales over the period - and a 977 percent rise in DVD sales of a television series based on the book, according to data from Amazon.com, the online vendor."

"'In today's busy society, it is very difficult to find the time to sit down and read a book,' says Ray Johnson, professor of film heritage at Staffordshire University. People with jobs and children often find themselves dipping in and out of books and it takes them weeks to reach the end.'"

There is nothing new about any of this. We've all heard about how no one has the time to read anymore. And the transformation of libraries into "information centres" catering to the public's appetite for a quick fix (whether of information or entertainment) is readily observable to most regular library-goers. 

But I don't think this new model of information centre is going to stick. I say this not because I'm a hopeless Luddite worshipping at the temple of the book, but simply because this is not the kind of thing that libraries in the future will do best. The library as information centre can't compete with the Internet. With a high-speed connection you will be able to download all of the movies and music you want at home for a low fee (that is, if you want to pay at all). Why go to the library to borrow a copy of something that is, after all, only bits of information on a disc? The old physical technology of the book is not as easy to move about, and far harder to copy.

The rise in popularity of DVDs cuts both ways. Yes, it is a little upsetting to think that some people will only know Pride and Prejudice as a television series (note that the spike in sales was not for the 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier!). But as I had occasion to say in the 2003 Year-in-Review Panel, DVDs are also having the effect of making movies more like books. The classics are now restored in various "editions" that often come with a variety of critical materials, including commentary, notes on sources, and visual essays. And the experience of watching these movies is becoming more and more like reading: Something done at home, alone, at intervals (scene selection is even divided into "chapters"). 

Doesn't all of this signify the triumph of the book?

November 5/03: From the Cheap Seats

M. G. Vassanji has won this year's Giller Prize for his novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The hour-long awards ceremony was carried live on BookTelevision and the CBC.

And it was a pretty good show. The success of such a program, as a televised entertainment, lies in how nearly the producers are able imitate the feel of a glamorous "gala" awards ceremony like the Oscars. This isn't an easy thing to do with the Giller, as there is only one prize and the nominees aren't exactly Hollywood's beautiful people. Anything, however, can be made to seem sexy on TV. It's probably just as well there's no commercial need to make celebrities out of the winners of awards for scientific research.

Host Mary Walsh wasn't very funny, but she did manage to deflect two obvious criticisms of the show in her opening monologue: that the whole thing was a big Toronto, and an even bigger Jack Rabinovitch, love-in. Rabinovitch is the millionaire founder of the award, and Walsh remarked how it behooved the audience "to suck-up to such a generous and charming host." And suck-up they did. One hopes the fact that his was the "10th anniversary Giller Prize" was behind all of the fawning and that this doesn't happen every year. Jack was "magnificent," "a very smart cookie," "a goddamn genius," "a national treasure," and on and on. 

Sure it was his party, but this still made it seem self-indulgent.

Random thoughts:

Rabinovitch announced during his monologue that each of the three jury members had read all of the 97 books nominated. I guess he has to say that, doesn't he? Last year Michael Kinsey made a bit of a stir when he confessed to only looking at 50 of the more than 400 books nominated for the National Book Awards, and that he only skimmed the eventual winner. Kinsey took his lumps, but at least he was being honest. The whole process is in need of an overhaul.

I liked the little films introducing the nominees, though the presenters would have done just as well reading from the dustjackets as reading the jury's comments (on the winner: "a mesmerizing literary landscape replete with luminous memories, fascinating characters and inspiring prose").

Why did every cutaway to a press clipping seem to be taken from the pages of the Globe and Mail? Don't we have any other newspapers in this country?

I don't see why the editor's name had to be announced along with the author's. I guess it won't be long before they make their way onto the title page.

John Gould's Kilter apparently only received one review when it first came out. The lone reviewer, Chris Redekop at the Winnipeg Free Press, was interviewed for the show and expressed his surprise at its selection. "My . . . thought was: Who else has read this book? I'm the only one in the world who's read this book. I know that. And I'm not on the Giller nomination committee. So I don't know how they found it."

Good question.

Why is the Giller Prize considered so glamorous and vital while the Governor-General's Literary Awards are anything but? Is it the Toronto factor? I find it a curious bias, since I don't think the Giller's track record at picking winners is any better. Does it have something to do with the Giller being a "private," industry-friendly award, where the G-G.'s are seen as dour and bureaucratic? If so it's an interesting comment on the arts in this country. Interesting because the Giller is far more of an establishment award. Perhaps the G-G.'s should be re-cast as an "independent spirit" award and steal some of their mojo back.

No comment on the winner. I passed on the review.

October 31/03: More Bullshit From the Globe and Mail

Kate Taylor, writing in the Globe and Mail, has called for a more lively critical debate over literature in this country. She chastises "mealy-mouthed reviewers tiptoeing around the books they are reviewing, leaving readers to discern their real opinions between the lines."

Hadn't I read all this before? I don't just mean the jumping on the "snark" bandwagon, which, as usual for the Globe, is now taking place some months after the exhaustion of the subject elsewhere. I mean Taylor's call for more courageous reviewing. Checking the archives, I found a piece I wrote August 2, 2002 in response to much the same thing being by Sandra Martin (see "Bad Reviews" for the full story). Here's a taste:

In her musings on the Peck-Moody spat she [Sandra Martin] complains that there aren't enough venues for criticism of Canadian literature, and that the tone of what does get published is "so reverential you can sniff the incense swirling about both the 'work' and the 'artists' under discussion." What Ms. Martin claims to want is "more depth, analysis, controversy and length." "Readers and writers," she declares, "deserve a change of pace."

To which I responded:

If you're looking for a review source where the tone is so reverential you can sniff the incense I would say the very first place to visit is the Globe. Ms. Martin, instead of indulging in her own regularly fawning portraits of "artists" and their "work" . . . might consider getting off her ass and pushing the envelope a little harder herself.

And we all know what chance there was of that happening.

Given their almost total ignorance of what passes for literary debate in Canada (have either of these women ever been online?), one has to assume Martin's reverential incense and Taylor's mealy-mouthed tip-toeing simply refer to the lively book chat that regularly appears in the pages of the Globe and Mail. One can hardly expect the columnists at the Globe to contribute anything to the real debate. They can't. One doesn't even expect them to recognize it, especially given Taylor's apparent understanding of a national "literary community" whose borders are those of her paper's newsroom. The whole point of columns like these is to deny the existence of an independent Canadian literary culture by deliberately ignoring it.

Over and over again.

October 23/03: Turning On the Lads

Education experts in Britain are advising that the classics be radically transformed, and the way they are taught reappraised, in an effort to "help turn boys on to literature." According to a report in the Guardian, critics complain that "the subject has to be 'defeminised'": "So ingrained is the 'laddish' culture in comprehensive schools that boys are rejecting English A-levels as 'sissy' and only studied by girls." Literature is seen as suffering an identity crisis. As one expert puts it, "We are not asking enough radical questions about what English literature really is." As a model for what might be done, some education advisors point to the popular television modernizations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (with the Wife of Bath as an aging soap star) and Othello (where the Moor of Venice becomes the first black commissioner of the Metropolitan police).

The "feminisation" of literature seems to be a trendy subject these days. Another story this week mentioned a new macho-sounding fiction imprint out of England ("Spitfire Books") meant to counteract all of the "namby-pamby" feminist "crap" given young men to read these days. Britain, the founders maintain, "has become 'so feminised and touchy feely' that rattling good male adventure yarns, books by men on men, and novels with boozing, smoking and sometimes debauched 'real chaps' have been sacrificed on the altar of feminism." Meanwhile, writing in the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand mourned the loss of the "heroic male" in CanLit. Apparently this year saw a "rash of novels populated by feminized or ineffectual men." Oh for the days of Duddy Kravitz and Dunstan Ramsay.

There may be a case to be made for some of this, but I have the sense that most complaints about the "feminisation" of literature are really expressions of anxiety over the feminisation of the reading public. Hence all the concern (some of it understandable) over "laddism" in Britain and the lopsided demographics of book-buying. But most of this is nothing new, and complaints about a literature written by and for bluestockings is pretty much a historical constant. As I've already said a bit about this before (see "Getting Men to Read" and "Kid Stuff"), I won't go into it again here.

What I did want to say something about is the notion that a radical transformation of the classics will turn boys, or for that matter anyone, on to reading. This is total nonsense. Is there any evidence that classics made into miniseries, movies or comic books instills a desire to go out and read the originals? Doesn't it just make you want to watch more television? How many people who saw Clueless rushed out to read Emma? Such adaptations only provide a mass public what they really want, which is more teen comedies (or, in the case of the new Othello, more cop shows). These educational experts would do well to listen to Hannah Arendt:

"The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say." 

The danger of "mass education" is not an elitist bugbear. Lovers of the classics in their original form are not an "elite." And it is not being elitist to ask why the classics should have to be degraded to conform with acceptable standards of mass entertainment. Getting rid of the classics, which is what this radical questioning is all about, isn't going to help the lads.

September 17/03: Wider and Wider

This year the National Book Awards has presented its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters to Stephen King.

When I first heard the news I wasn't at all upset or surprised. Stephen King is a popular writer who has maintained a certain consistency over a long and productive career. He is limited by his genre, and may be incapable of work of greater range, but I don't hold that against him. Harold Bloom's carping aside ("That they [the National Book Foundation] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy"), King is still better at what he does than most "literary" authors. 

But there is more to the story.

According to the report in the New York Times, the Foundation's decision came as the result of being "under pressure from publishers to shake up its sleepy image." Publishers, who largely finance the award, want something sexier. Literary awards are a contest for media attention, and the industry (which calls the shots), want more bang for their buck (the ongoing debate over whether the Booker Prize should include American authors is driven by similar considerations).

Unfortunately, this has the effect of watering down the meaning, if not the purpose, of having literary awards. As the Times reports, "Although the honor denotes a contribution to American letters, several board members said they also considered the cultural influence of [King's] many works adapted for film and television."

This is a dangerous road to travel down. One board member, Isisara Bey, is quoted as saying that the National Book Awards have "to explore different areas of writing." Fair enough. But what exactly does Ms. Bey mean? Well, she is vice president of corporate affairs at the music division of Sony, if that's any indication. Apparently her introduction to King's work was the movie The Shawshank Redemption. 

"His work has translated so well in so many other mediums," Ms. Bey is quoted as saying. "I really liked that it was not only good on the page, it makes great movies, I mean, really great movies."

I would disagree with this. There have only been a couple of good movies made from King's work (and he has publicly disowned the best). But leaving matters of taste aside, such a judgment as Ms. Bey's is, or at least should be, irrelevant. In most cases an author doesn't even write the screenplay for the film version of their work. In what sense does the fact that a blockbuster movie has been made out of one of their books widen the National Book Award to explore different areas of writing?

Literary awards can recognize genre fiction without selling their souls to the entertainment industry by handing out prizes for "cultural impact." I'm afraid the decision of the National Book Foundation is not a middle ground.

September 10/03: The Believers

A year after a notorious review by literary provocateur Dale Peck received what I described then (see here) as a "surprising amount of media attention," negative reviews are back in the news. 

But while Peck's trashing of Rick Moody led to an interesting and somewhat informed debate, the current squawking has me baffled. A year ago, Sandra Martin (of all people) was calling for more controversy as a way of dispelling the clouds of reverential incense surrounding contemporary CanLit criticism. Now we have the backlash. 

The latest round of hand-wringing was set off by Laura Miller at Salon.com in a review of Chuck Palahniuk's Diary. For the record, I've read a couple of Palahniuk's books (and reviewed one, Choke), and I have no intention of reading any more. I don't think he's a very good writer. Reading Miller's thoroughly negative review my only thought was, "She's really got his number." Palahniuk's work is fixated on our obsession with the commercial, and one thing Miller pointed out was that he gets his brand names wrong. This might not seem like such a big deal, but it is certainly relevant when discussing an author who thinks these things are important. 

Readers were outraged. Palahniuk's own defence was as weak as one could imagine, saying only that Miller should try writing a novel herself some day. His vocal supporters online went further. Miller was just being bitchy. She didn't get it. Her screed gave off a foul stench. Indeed, she should never have written the review at all, given that she was predisposed to hate the book anyway. 

This reaction struck me as bizarre. As Auden pointed out, every critic is at heart a polemicist. If you think a book is representative of something that is wrong with our literary culture you have a duty to take it on. There is nothing personal about it.

Alas, in a celebrity culture everything is personal. How else to explain Clive James's calm assertion in the New York Times that "When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him"? "Curioser and curioser," as Alice would say. I had apparently gone through the looking glass.

James's column, "The Good of a Bad Review," put a name behind the backlash. Several months ago a new literary journal named The Believer was launched. In its debut issue (March, 2003) one Heidi Julavits attacked "Snark": "the hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt" of book reviews that are "just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals."

Higher ideals. Things were really getting strange now. Scary even. It seems Ms. Julavits is really big on "belief." She wants book reviewers to declare themselves. This is not a question of critical standards or locating the basis for aesthetic judgments. This is . . .  personal:

"snark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not; the pointlessness of fiction only comes back to suggest the pointlessness of its commentator. The real question then becomes: If you don't believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don't have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?"

Career advancement? For a book reviewer? My bafflement was now total. But to get back to "belief":

"I'm simply asking that we read between the lines, and see what value systems these reviews are really espousing."

Value systems. Belief systems. Higher ideals. Was I or had I ever been a party member? I made every attempt to understand what Julavits was getting at, but could not figure out how the question of whether or not I "believed in" Salman Rushdie made any difference to whether or not I thought he was worth reading. I began to wonder what it was Julavits believed in. I found this: "I would say, quite generally, that I believe literature has an intrinsic worth, and that I believe in employing both fairness and rigor when assessing the success or failure of an author's project." Hmmm. Quite general indeed. Declaring that you think literature has an intrinsic worth sure makes for one hell of a literary manifesto.

The Believer is the offspring of the McSweeney's crowd, and Julavits's vacuous rant reminded me of a column on the political activism of these Young Literary Turks. Apparently they are "idealistic about education, sentimental about children and impatient with the homogeneous culture that corporations produce." Radical positions, to be sure. Critics of little faith and more experience may know how idealism and sentimentality usually add up to a lot of phony posing. I will only say that McSweeney's politics and aesthetics seem to be of a piece.

I also thought of how such a theory of belief might play out in practice. Julavits admits to having an "intellectual crush" on the British critic James Wood. Well, Wood certainly believes in something. But I've always thought his religiosity was the least interesting and least relevant part of any of his book reviews. Julavits also thinks he should not have reviewed Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man. Why not? After all, his belief system "famously abhors" what Smith is all about. Apparently it is just "lurid and malicious" to air one's beliefs like this. Norman Podhoretz is described as an "infamous" New York Intellectual, but doesn't Julavits's manifesto call for more critics like him? When Podhoretz attacked Heller's Catch-22 as a vicious slur on the the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces, wasn't he just giving voice to his own value system and higher ideals? Wasn't he a Believer?

Belief doesn't enter into it. The online Inquisition "Snarkwatch" hosted by The Believer, where whistle-blowers attack reviews that fail to maintain a requisite level of idealism and sentimentality (that is, phoniness) is offensive. To say that certain people should be disqualified in advance from reviewing some books is a form of censorship. Interest and concern are the only prerequisites. Faith has no place in any kind of critical enterprise.

August 1/03: A Vast Right-Wing Buzz Machine

A headline in the Guardian reports that "Blasts at liberal 'traitors'" have won the "US book war." The story refers to the surge in sales of "right-wing diatribes" by authors such as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage.

If you don't recognize any of these names you may consider yourself lucky. Coulter was the TV pundit who wanted all Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity after 9/11. Michael Savage is a loudmouth talk radio personality who was recently fired from a TV programme for telling a gay caller: 'You should go and get Aids and die, you pig'." Bill O'Reilly thinks that those who don't support the US military are "enemies of the state."

Of course they don't mean it. The "right-wing diatribe" phenomenon (which includes all of Fox News) is just their shtick. They aren't "right-wing theorists" so much as conservative stand-ups. Coulter is the bearded lady, Savage the dancing bear in a tutu. They strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. This stuff tends to feed on itself for a while, then reach a point of excess where it becomes either so offensive or so repetitive the audience tunes out.

What is upsetting is the way the "left-wing" liberal media (I'm being ironic; there has never been a liberal elite in America, and certainly not in the media) keeps playing up this trash. Here is the second paragraph of the Guardian story:

"Hillary Clinton's autobiography leads this month's US bestseller lists, but over the last year it has been books written from the opposite end of the political spectrum - many of them accusing her husband of everything from treason to destroying the American way of life - which have gripped the imagination of the book-buying public."

So Hillary Clinton's autobiography sells over one million copies, Coulter's rant Treason sells half that, and the "war" is over? What evidence is there that right-wing diatribes have gripped the imagination of the "book-buying public"? What about Michael Moore's Stupid White Men which was the top non-fiction bestseller of 2002, with over 3 million copies sold worldwide after being translated into 24 languages?

I'd like to know what "book-buying public" we're talking about. Whatever segment of the population it is that gets off on hate-filled diatribes, I doubt they do a lot of reading. But more to the point, why does the media, even while feigning disapproval, keep giving credibility to these people? Ann Coulter has never been taken seriously. She doesn't even expect to be taken seriously. She just wants to be noticed (and reviewed). Why do I have to go online to find reporting like Dennis Loy Johnson's story on "The Secret Bestseller List." What Johnson found was that books by anti-war writers like Noam Chomsky, though enjoying brisk sales, were being quietly dropped from major bestseller lists.

It would take a truly liberal media - that is, a free media - to tell us about that.

July 29/03: A Yawn Heard 'Round the World

A story in this weekend's New York Times with the headline "America Yawns at Foreign Fiction" addresses America's apparent indifference to literature in translation. "Writers, publishers and cultural critics have long lamented the difficulty of interesting American readers in translated literature, and now some say the market for these books is smaller than it has been in generations."

The Times story tries to package this as important news (one source refers to the situation as a "national crisis"), but it really isn't saying anything that hasn't been obvious for a while. (It has, for example, been the focus of frequent comment at the Complete Review. One wishes more mainstream media outlets would at least acknowledge what are now the leading online resources.) The usual explanation for America's lack of interest in other cultures is that since the United States is an Imperial center, what goes on there is of importance to the rest of the world while what goes on in the rest of the world is of little consequence to the U.S. As one American editor quoted in the story remarks, "the hard fact is that given the reality of the world, we simply don't have to be concerned about Laos, but people there might well want to be or have to be concerned about America."

As a test for determining the value of art this is a joke. I don't have any personal interest in Colombia, but I do have a huge respect for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Still, the "hard facts" are not without significance. The rest of the world has to be concerned about America. And even given the escapist bent of most popular culture, American fiction probably does tell us something. America's biggest fiction bestsellers, for example, see the Middle East as the epicenter for an apocalyptic Christian "Rapture."  This might be of concern to people living in the region. Speaking more generally, Laurie Brown, senior vice president for marketing and sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers, says that American fiction is more "action-oriented" than its "more philosophical and reflective" European cousins. American readers want more "immediate gratification" and "accessible information": "We often look for the story, rather than the story within the story. We'd rather read lines than read between the lines." Or, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it a few years ago:

"As the time they can devote to letters is very short, they seek to make the best use of the whole of it. They prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for beauties self-proffered, and easily enjoyed; above all, they must have what is unexpected and new."

De Toqueville thought American democracy threatened by a "tyranny of the masses." In cultural terms this same tyranny, which he also describes, is usually referred to as "dumbing down." Globally: McCulture.

The director of the German Book Office in New York remarks that "the main reason" Germans buy American books and Americans don't buy German books "is simply that America dominates the world, whether in film or literature or politics." There is more to this than Imperial precedence. But what do we mean when we say that American culture "dominates the world"? It's difficult to argue that America leads the way in terms of the quality or originality of its artistic expression. International cinema was once influenced by American Westerns and gangster films, but Hollywood is only a formula line now, content to borrow most of its creativity (when it even attempts to be creative) from European and Asian product. Apparently Americans also yawn at foreign films, leading to such sterile exercises, all within the last year, as the re-makes for domestic consumption of Insomnia, The Ring, and Solaris. This doesn't qualify as imitation, much less dominance.

In literature, the English language probably came closest to global dominance at the time of International Modernism (so called because of the flowering of English-language literatures worldwide). Has English dominated world literature in the same way since? Since 1950, how many of the world's most important novelists have written in English? Marquez, Grass, Kundera, Murakami - alongside names like these we may place a Pynchon or a Roth. But is this dominance?

When Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III was made into a movie the title was changed to The Madness of King George, in part because the movie's producers thought Americans would be confused and think it was the final part of a trilogy. When Harry Potter made his debut it was in a book titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In America the title was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the name also given to the movie) because it was felt that American readers wouldn't know what a philosopher's stone was.

Dominance? You bet. It's enough to make me . . . yawn.